Monday, November 18, 2013

Guest Post: What makes Obamacare so messy

It took me a while of reading numerous articles about what
is happening to people that is making so many of them so upset. But
slowly a picture has emerged of what makes this so messy for many people.

It all boils down to whether any existing insurance plan meets the Obamacare
requirements. And we hear again and again from insurance companies that
they had no choice but to cancel plans that the people in them found just
great, because they didn't meet the Obamacare requirements.

When you hear that so many times, you finally realize that some bunch of
planners, somewhere, made up various structures of different plans, like what
they would cover and how. All these are like templates for the plans,
with a list of what each particular kind of plan must have in it. So each
insurance company has to take their plans and fit them against the templates,
looking for one that matches up in every detail.

And if the existing plan is missing just one item out of a couple dozen in the
template, that plan can no longer be offered by the insurance company.
The assumption is that plans which don't fit any template are inferior,
and the consumer is better off being made to look for something else.

This is what is dangerous, in that someone else is telling you that you aren't
capable of picking a plan that will serve your interests properly. So
they, the really smart people, are going to "take good care" of you,
and "help" you find the "right" kind of plan. My
daughter and her husband signed up for a very basic plan, almost like what used
to be called a Major Medical plan. They examined it carefully, and
understood very well what they were buying, and it has worked fine for them,
even covering the costs of having a baby.

BUT.... under Obamacare such minimal plans are not available, they are just not
"right" for people. So the plan they have been referred to
covers significantly more things, but costs literally 4 times as much. They've
tried to shop around, but nothing else is much better for them. Now they're
waiting to find out if they qualify for a subsidy that will help them pay for
the new plan. When they get that subsidy, which I think they will, it may
still not get them down to the costs they used to have. But the other question
is, where does the money for that subsidy come from?

Guess what- it will come from all the increased fees that almost everyone in
the middle class will be paying for their health care and/or the taxes that
everyone pays the federal government. Back to the good old transfer of
wealth concept so dear to socialism.

The insurance companies are not out there to go bankrupt, they have a
responsibility to their stockholders to turn a profit. To be sure of that
they need to charge enough for the plans that they are now required to offer,
which make no allowance for previous health history and no cap on payments.
That means a lot of people running all kinds of software to figure out
what will be safe for them to charge. And the cost per person to be insured,
on average, must go up.

So everything that is happening starts to become understandable. The
insurance companies must offer plans that fit the templates made up by some
geniuses who got to impose their own arbitrary ideas on what people have to
have in plans; and they must take into account the increases risks of accepting
prior health problems, and no caps on payments as well. This adds up to a
situation in which costs charged must go up, or level of benefits must go down,
or both. And that is exactly what we're seeing in the sad reports of
people caught in the middle of this.

And taxpayers have to bear the cost of the immense bureaucracy that watches
over this system, not to mention the expansion of the IRS to be the enforcers
of the system. (With the fantastic irony of the IRS people not having to
go into Obamacare themselves.)

So all the predictions of these problems have come true, as was absolutely
inevitable, despite all the promises that were given to the American people
that it would all just be great. More coverage for more people for less
money, from a whole new giant federal bureaucracy. And the Easter bunny
can be counted on as well.

2 comments:

Clearly I am daft or suffering from CRS (can't remember #$^@) disease as I recall much of the rhetoric at the time to be about the high cost of medical care along w/ the high cost of insurance as being the two biggest barriers. Yet when big insurance was eerily silent during the second-term election-you would have had to be brain dead to not see who was going to benefit big time and who was going to pay, and pay and pay and pay. Affordable Health Care Act has to be the single, most superlative example of an oxy moron ever to fall from man's lips.